Ever wanted to add color and edit really, really old movies? Our grand parents did not have HD cameras which means today, we have hundreds of thousands of hours of video recorded a few decades ago. Movies, documentaries and family videos gathering dust in some archive or a shelf in your home. With the new recoloring and digitizing technology, it’s now possible to digitize (meaning you can open them in video editing tools on your computer) and recolor old, shaky videos. Some very interesting work is being done in Sweden by a company which provides software for this. Film studios use this software to restore old movies. It’s called AgiScan.

Those of you who’ve experienced using Adobe CS5 with and without a NVIDIA GPU know the difference in performance. Creative people at film studios don’t like the lag when they work on video editing so performance is a must for video editing software but performance does not come cheap. In the case of AgiScan, it consumed 2 high-end Intel Xeon processors to barely touch real-time (25FPS) video processing. These processors alone cost USD3000+.

Folks at AgiScan discovered CUVI and to cut the long story short, CUVI enabled them to do a lot more for a lot less. From 2 Intel Xeon series processors, they got down to 1 entry level Intel Core i7 processor and a mid range NVIDIA GeForce GPU. Straight 1/3rd cost reduction per machine! And with CUVI integrated into AgiScan, it can now process high resolution (2k) videos at 30FPS. Not only this but the software can also “record” and “preview” in real-time, without any lag, something which they could not achieve previously.

We at TunaCode are really excited by the value CUVI can add to video and image processing applications.

Here’s a screen shot of AgiScan 3. It shows a restored frame from some old movie. Who knows this kid might be 100 now